There are two considerations generally relating to cancer: it is the number one killer in the United States (when taken as an aggregate of the multiple forms of the disease) and the earlier the detection the greater the likelihood for a positive outcome. Cancers are often discovered only when they are large enough to be seen with an imaging device or when they have spread so much that they have severely affected the health of the ill patient.
Cancer diagnostics suffer from several major challenges. Some tests, notably PSA (prostate-specific antigen) tests for prostate cancer, are often inaccurate harbingers of the disease's presence. Additionally, some tests require unpleasant surgery or the like to obtain biopsies. Other tests, notably the BRAC series of genetic tests for breast cancer, are prohibitively expensive. An ideal cancer diagnostic would require nothing more than a blood sample and would give highly accurate and reliable results, even for “small” cancers that have not yet reached a size easily visible on X-ray, CAT, and MRI machines.
The prior art generally describes methods for determining a disease state directly from the presence of a predetermined biomolecule produced as a result of said disease state. Improvements in determining disease states, including but not limited to cancers, are thus needed.